Web Unit Session 6 in b207

Today the session was a bit different for the students. They had AJ come in and do an AJ Stop-in, which was new. That took both Education and Exploration. Afterwards, they had their permit test in Certification and a blog prompt to answer. Although initially the students were told that they'd have time during Exploration to work and finish any of their previous projects and time to work on their BTW in Certification, the AJ Stop-in took more time than anticipated, so they will be left for next week, when AJ will do his thing in Kevin's room.
During Education, AJ came in to do his Stop-in. His goal was to inform and assess the students. He had a presentation that was essentially a survey of the HTML and CSS. It wasn't about what Kevin and/or Felipe had been teaching in the classrooms, it was about HTML and CSS in general, what they should know about them regardless of the instructor. He had a nice powerpoint with some cool graphics filled with awesome information (although the orange text was a little hard to read), like the differences between the types of CSS. He also heavily emphasized the terms attribute, property, and value and what is associated with each one. This seemed to help the students. AJ had a worksheet for the students to fill out as he taught. There were points in his presentation when he'd pause to have the students fill out something based on a prompt. There was also a section of the worksheet with missing HTML elements and the students had to go through and find and fix them all. This went pretty well. AJ and Felipe went around and helped the students when they raised their hands and stayed with a specific student for a little bit at a time. In general the students were able to identify and correct the broken HTML. The students took a break after AJ finished going over his presentation. After (a shortened) break, the students came back to finish the AJ Stop-in. During Exploration, AJ had a more hands-on activity, in which he had the students fix his website, because he forgot to make a page for the puppets...
After a quick demonstration by AJ, the students grabbed AJ's files off the network and began to work. They had to create a new text document, name it appropriately, and change the file type to HTML. Once they had that, they had to open up one of the pages with an editor, copy the HTML, and paste it into their newly-created puppets.html. Once the text was in there, they had to reword a few tags so it was clear the page was about puppets. During the rewording part, Stephanie went ahead and stared adding in the image. She managed to do it all on her own, calling Felipe and AJ over just to make sure she was doing it right. She added the image on her own while going ahead of everyone else. Yeah, that's the same Stephanie who, when AJ asked if she was ready in the morning, had to be given a few extra minutes to raise her hand! It was awesome. A lot of the students had similar situations--they'd call over an instructor to check to see if the work was right, and more often than not, it was. Fixing AJ's site went really well overall. The students seemed to like it to. AJ also talked about and demonstrated how to slice an image or web layout in Photoshop. He demonstrated it with his Thailand website: he had the .jpg image in Photoshop, talked about how he could do it by cropping and undoing, and then showed the students how to use the slice tool. He then talked a little about file organization, about how if you're not using a file in your website, you should delete (and did so with some unused slice images) and talked a little about Serif and Sans Serif fonts.
After the second break, the students had to take their permit test. The test didn't seem to go as well at first, but looking at reports from past classes, it seems that it went just as expected. In actuality, Felipe's class, with the AJ Stop-in, had about 10% higher scores on average than Kevin's class, who is going to be getting the AJ Stop-in next session. It seems the AJ Stop-ins work really well! The day ended with a blog prompt asking the students about their thoughts on the AJ Stop-in and on the permit test and asking for a screenshot of their puppets.html page. The general consensus from the students was positive regarding the AJ Stop-in and not so positive on the permit test.
Here's David's artifact:

In general, most of the artifacts looked like that as well, except David also changed the text for the page, which no one else did.

Next time in The Web Unit:

Students will see time to complete any previous projects they may not have completed, or may not have been satisfied with. If it becomes that a student claims to be done, they will be asked to work on a project. The HARDEST project (in their opinion). Everyone will be working on something. No. Ex. Cu. Ses. Felipe will (should) make an announcement telling the students that they will need to have a rough draft of their BTWs DONE by the end of the [April 10th] session. As students will see Spring Break before that session, No. Ex. Cu. Ses.

Tune in next time!

Day Numero 6 in B109

Hi,

Today we had a blast. First, and most of the day, we went to an online copy of the inline to external activity. Downloading it to our computers and then making that into a website, complete with images, took QUITE a bit of time.

But we did it, and it was awesome. Next, we started moving inline styles to external styles. It took quite a bit of remembering, to the point of the instructor having to go up and do the activity he demoed the past two sessions again, but we learned it. More or less.

All that business ended up taking up both the Education and Exploration sections. And, as always, students had to teach each other in order to survive the harsh climate of B109.

The last period, A.J. came in and had the students do a survey. Then, they cheerfully took a permit test, and finally, they bloggered.

Oh, speaking of A.J., that reminds me: the other classroom, B to the two 07, did A.J.'s assessment, whereas here in ol' B109, we just worked on the Inline to External activity. So next time, we're ready for the Assessment!

Adios ~

Fantastically Positioned Pages - Day 5 of WEB U

Our day blasted off with a demonstration of how positioning in CSS works. Students learned about static positioning ("browser default!" later exclaimed a student's blog), relative, absolute, and fixed. Oscar took it outside the classroom and pointed out how MySpace uses fixed positioning to keep elements of their site in the same place.



After the demonstration, students drilled down on details by following a worksheet of the same activity.

A good hour into the morning we all went upstairs for a meeting about rules. That prompted a discussion of servers upon our return. Students re-learned how special software turns a regular computer into a server, and Kevin displayed some code he wrote for a class that does just that.

The next 20 minutes or so was a lesson using Felipe's excellent website-cum-activity, inline to external styles. Kevin presented a fictitious future for the students, in which they are professional web designers asked to change the background on 500 web pages for a single website! Using inline styles, this task would take ages. With external styles, however, it takes deleting and adding one word.

For the final stretch, students worked on their BTWs. Kevin was accused of giving students' computers' viruses when the site he suggested, cameriod, wasn't working. At the end of another frantic, exciting day, groups made true progress on their BTWs, and upped their CSS wizardry skills.

Inline/External Style Sheets/Positioning, a collection of awesome stuff to learn

 

Just like this cool computer dude from : http://media.merchantcircle.com, we looked closely today----we looked closely at coding for positioning and at replacing inline styles with external style sheets.

We started off right away with a step-by-step activity on positioning in CSS. Our .html file created 4 colored boxes on the display. We changed the codes for the position of the boxes on the screen then watched how our changes affected the display.We learned that we can set the position as "relative" to the objects above and below, or that we can make it be "fixed" so that it stays at the same place on the screen. We also learned that if we don't tell the browser to set "margin: 0" that it will automatically create a white margin space around whatever we want it to display.

Then we had a meeting with all of ITA to talk about new rules regarding movement between rooms and leaving the building by 4:15 PM.

After the meeting, we began working on creating external style sheets to replace inline display of styles. This activity was challenging for many of the students, although Juan M., Juan A., DJ and Aubrey seemed to catch on fairly quickly.

We were relieved to take a brief break and then everyone got into BTW groups to work on organizing the files in the network drive. Students also took a few minutes to blog.